by Scott Meyer
“I can see why you’d resent that. Just trying to be positive, though, the whole reason she’s here is that you go back in time at some point in the future and become her, so you will get to build the city, and you do get to try all of your ideas, and eventually, you will get the credit.”
Brit turned, looked at Phillip, and said, “Please, Phillip, don’t be so positive. It’s not becoming for people like us,” which got a small laugh out of Phillip. She continued, “And, when I do go back and build, I won’t really be designing and building, I’ll be copying what was here when I got here. I’ll be copying from her.”
“But if she’s you . . .”
“Then who am I copying? Who designed Atlantis in the first place? I don’t know, but I do know that it wasn’t me, and really, that’s all I care about right now.”
Phillip started to say something, but Brit put a finger across his lips to silence him. She smiled, but with firmness in her tone, she said, “And, frankly, I’m talking about someone I can’t stand. If the best thing you can think of to cheer me up is to tell me that I’ll be just like her someday, I’d suggest that you probably shouldn’t bother.”
Phillip smiled and nodded. Brit took her finger away.
They rode in silence as strange, colorful sea creatures swam past. Brit piloted the bubble over a tall stand of coral, and before them, a vista of brightly colored shapes stretched on as far as they could see.
Brit said, “So, Phillip. You haven’t had much to say about the reef. What do you think?”
“It’s very nice,” Phillip said. He looked around a bit then added, “Pretty.”
Brit looked at him, a smile slowly growing on her face. She bit her lip, then turned her attention to the control panel in front of her. She scrolled through more menu options before looking back up to Phillip.
“Okay, Phil. I’ve shown you something pretty. Now, how would you like to see something really cool?”
“Yes, please!”
Brit tapped the controls and everything went black. Phillip’s eyes strained to adjust to the light, but there was no light to adjust to. After a second or two he saw the control panel emit a subtle glow.
“Where are we?” Phillip whispered.
“”Very, very deep,” Brit answered in an equally hushed tone.
“Why are we whispering?” Phillip asked.
“I don’t know. You started it,” she whispered, then added in a more conversational tone, “Nothing can hear us while we’re inside this sphere.”
Phillip surveyed the vista around them. “I can see why you brought me here. This is definitely the darkest dark I’ve ever seen.”
Brit said, “Just wait. It gets better,” as she hit a few buttons, and the darkness around them flashed and took on a greenish glow. What had looked like nothing but a solid field of black was now a vast three-dimensional galaxy of faint, light-green stars, drifting slowly around them.
“What happened?” Phillip asked.
“I set the sphere to filter the infra-red spectrum so that it’s visible to us. Also, the sphere is emitting infra-red, or else there still wouldn’t be anything to see down here.”
“Why is it all green?” Phillip asked.
“Because it looks cool that way. Kinda night-visiony. I can change it if you like.”
“No,” Phillip said, “please leave it. What are all of these things floating around us?”
“Debris. Dead krill. Fish poop. I don’t know, to be honest. They’re not what we came to see.”
“What did we come to see?”
Brit smiled. “We’ll get to that in a minute. First, Gwen tells me you’re from the eighties, right?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me, what do you know about giant squid?”
“Huh,” Phillip said, thinking. “Giant squid. Let’s see. Sailors used to tell stories about them, most likely to impress other sailors. They used to draw them on maps. They made a really cool mechanical one for the movie 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.”
Brit hit a button, and the dots of light that surrounded them started to move in unison, and all in the same direction, telling Phillip that the craft was moving. The effect was much like driving in a snowstorm, or how Phillip imagined flying in an extremely fast spaceship would look. “Are they real?” Brit asked, then added, “Giant squids?”
“No,” Phillip said. “I mean, I’ve read stuff about big tentacles washing up on beaches, but that’s mostly tabloid stuff. I’d guess they’re no more real than the Loch Ness Monster, or Bigfoot.”
“Yeah,” Brit said, “probably. Say, what’s that?” She pointed straight ahead. At first Phillip didn’t see what she meant. He squinted, and in the distance he saw a ghostly image of something, something graceful and fluid. It almost looked like an immense snake, reaching out for them. Maybe an eel, Phillip thought. It was getting closer, or, to be more accurate, they were gaining on it. As whatever it was came clearer, Phillip could see that it wasn’t an eel. At the very least, it was several eels swimming together. As they drew even closer, Phillip saw some dark mass ahead of the things, whatever they were. Were they chasing it? No, Phillip could see now, they’re part of it!
“It can’t be,” Phillip said.
“It is,” Brit replied. “It’s Bigfoot.”
Brit maneuvered the craft out from behind the giant squid, accelerating to come up alongside of it. “Cool, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Yes, very, in a ghastly sort of way. The way the tentacles move, it’s almost hypnotic.” Phillip watched for a moment, then asked, “Did you make it?”
“No,” Brit said. “It’s real. One of the girls is into marine biology. When she found out about this craft and what it can do, she went off in search of all the coolest things she’d ever read about. We’ve got them all cataloged so we can come check them out any time. It’s better than any aquarium.”
“Its eye is bigger than my head,” Phillip said. “It can’t see us, can it?”
“No, it can’t see or hear us. It has no idea we’re here.”
“Good.”
They kept pace with the squid, watching in silence as it barreled through the dark. After a long silence, Phillip said, “Brit, I haven’t known you long, but I’ve been thinking about your situation.”
Brit laughed. “Phillip, we’re deep below the surface of the sea, looking at a creature that until five minutes ago you thought was a myth, and you want to talk about me?”
“What can I say,” Phillip said, “I just find some things particularly interesting.”
In the low light, Phillip couldn’t be sure that she had blushed, but he chose to believe that she had. “Look,” he said. “We know that we’re in a computer program, and knowing that allows us to play around with it to do things. Make things, fly, travel through time, that sort of thing. But Brit, none of us knows how the program really works. We tell ourselves that we do, but really we just understand bits of it. We think we know what happened when you came to Atlantis for the first time, but really, we have no idea how the program handled it. We just know what your experience of it was.”
Phillip paused a moment to give Brit a chance to tell him to shut up. She didn’t, so he continued. “You’re thinking of it as if your life has been an unbroken thread that just happens to loop back around on itself, but what if it’s not? What if you are the end of the thread, like the rest of us?”
“But Phillip, Brit the Elder is here. You can’t ignore her. Believe me, I’ve tried. She’s here, she’s me, and she remembers everything I do.”
“Or, so it would seem,” Phillip said, “but what if, the instant you got the idea to go further back in time and create Atlantis yourself if you had to, the program, whatever it is, took that to be the plan. Then, when you transported, it triggered the plan you had created, like a subroutine. So the program paused our reality—”
“I don’t know. I don’t see why it couldn’t, and if it did, we’d never know. So, anyway, it pauses reality, and creates a second copy of you, which then runs through a projected version of events, seeing that there’s nothing here, treading water for a few minutes presumably, then going back in time and creating the city. Then the program blasts through a thumbnail version of the past, what, hundred years? Then, when it has the past laid out, it restarts the program and you turn up, for the first time, from your point of view.”
Brit shook her head. “Maybe, but I don’t see how that makes any difference, and besides, that doesn’t explain how she remembers everything I’ve done.”
“Yes, it does. And it makes all of the difference. It means that you’re the real you, and she’s an imitation, created as a placeholder until the real thing is ready to take over, and her memories are being created on the fly by the program to reflect her past, which you’re creating now. You’ve been thinking the things she’s done affect you, but in truth, the things you do affect her. She’s just a puppet you, being changed constantly to reflect the actions you’ve taken, or are likely to take. Her past actions didn’t create you. Your current actions create her.”
Brit thought about it, then asked, “That explains how she remembers the things I’ve thought and done, but what about when she predicts the things that are going to happen to me?”
Phillip shrugged. “Maybe it’s the power of suggestion. You believe she knows your future, so when she says something’s going to happen, you make it happen. I don’t know. The good news is, you’re not doomed to be just like her if you don’t want to be. Brit, you can become anything you like and she will change to reflect your choices. If I’m right, you have more control over her than she does over you.”
“That is good news,” Brit said quietly, as if not wanting to be over heard. “What’s the bad news? There is bad news, I assume.”
Phillip took a deep breath “There’s always bad news. If I’m right, you can die.”
“Which is why you’re so worried that someone is trying to kill me.”
“Yes.”
They were both so absorbed in the implications of their discussion that they nearly didn’t notice the hollow popping noise, like a champagne bottle being uncorked.
A shrill, brittle tearing sound surrounded them as the diamond sphere that kept Phillip and Brit safe and dry was clouded by thousands of tiny, spider-web cracks. They had just enough time to realize what was happening, then see the looks of panic on each other’s faces before the sphere catastrophically imploded.
For any ordinary person, the implosion of a deep-sea submersible is an instant death. The violence of the event and the pressures involved will completely destroy the human body faster than its nervous system can register a single pain signal. Death is immediate and certain, like someone turning off a switch marked you. Phillip was not an ordinary person. He was a subroutine in a computer-generated reality, and he knew it. As such, he had made modifications to his parameters.
Phillip was badly stunned. He drifted in the water, his whole body screaming. He was impervious to physical damage, but the implosion had felt like being hit by a speeding car from every possible direction simultaneously. Normally, on the surface, he would take a few moments to recover from this. Phillip was not on the surface. He was deep under the ocean, and while the pressure was not killing him, it certainly wasn’t making him comfortable.
Phillip regained some small portion of his senses. He tried to look around, but there was no light this far down, and he no longer had the sphere to create and convert infra-red light into something his eyes could use. All he saw was, literally, a sea of blackness in every direction.
The cold was not an issue. Phillip’s modifications to his own statistics left him with a constant comfortable temperature regardless of the ambient conditions, so that was a victory. The oxygen situation was less positive. They had found ways to make people not need oxygen, but they hadn’t found a way to make them not feel like they need oxygen, so the unlucky few who had tried this modification (or had it tried on them) spent the entire time feeling like they were suffocating, even though they were not. This was deemed so horrific that no wizard he knew of had ever chosen to keep that modification installed, so Phillip needed air, and there was no way he could swim to the surface in time.
Because of the darkness and the pressure, he didn’t feel like he was drowning. He felt like he was buried alive, under a mountain of water, which was not an improvement.
Phillip flailed about helplessly. He was down far too deep to have any hope of swimming to the surface. He had no light, he had no air. He wasn’t thinking in rational sentences, or even words. Just fast, panicked images, one of which was of his staff waiting for him back at Brit’s home. It was too long to fit in the sphere, so he’d left it. Without it, the shell program he’d mostly invented would not recognize him as a wizard, and would not let him teleport to safety. It was meant to be a failsafe to keep the wrong people from using magic. Luckily, after the scare they’d all had two months ago, he had developed an emergency backup: a collapsible metal pointer that he’d modified to extend to the proper length for the shell to recognize it as a wand. All he had to do was pull it out, extend it, not make the obvious joke, and use his last breath to say the right spell, and he’d be back at home, safe. He knew that it wasn’t possible to talk in any meaningful way underwater, but as long as his lungs expelled some air, and his mouth and vocal cords formed the words, he was hopeful that the shell would recognize the incantation.
Hopeful was the word.
He jammed his right hand into his pocket, searching for the pointer. He swept his left hand in wide arcs with his fingers extended. If he could get a good grip on Brit, he could teleport them both to safety, but he needed to find her first.
He hadn’t had the chance to take a good deep breath before the implosion, and even if he had, the violence of it would have knocked most of the wind out of him anyway. His lungs were already aching. The pointer was easy enough to find in his pocket, but drifting underwater, it was surprisingly difficult to pull it out of his loose robe’s large pocket. Every time he tried to pull his hand out of the pocket, the pocket moved with his hand. Finally, after several tries, he suspended his left arm’s search for Brit, and sent it to assist his right arm. He grabbed the outside of the pocket with one hand, yanking the pointer out with the other.
He quickly extended the pointer, then started whipping his arms around wildly in a desperate attempt to find Brit. His lungs were on fire, but he did not want to leave without her. His movements got more and more frantic. Finally, he realized that if he didn’t get out of there soon, he wouldn’t get out of there at all.
His arms had yet to make contact with anything that might be another person. He was very quickly reaching decision time, when he felt something grab his left foot. For the first time since the implosion, actual words popped into his mind.
Oh God, he thought, it’s the squid!
Phillip pictured himself materializing back at home with a fifty-foot, angry, dying squid. He didn’t like what he saw. He jerked his leg upward, but it was held tight. He couldn’t shake the squid off. He knew that squid or no squid, he needed air, now. He drew up his other leg to make one desperate attempt to kick himself free. He looked down, towards his captured leg, and at first he thought he was hallucinating from the lack of oxygen. His eye struggled to focus and adjust, but submerged in murky water without goggles, his vision was only going to be so clear. Still, blurry though it was, Phillip definitely saw light beneath him. He stopped struggling and saw that it was not the squid that had his left foot, it was Brit. She had his foot jammed into the crook of her right arm, and the index finger of her left hand was glowing. They briefly made eye contact. Brit stabbed her glowing finger at a floating button that only she could see, and the two
of them disappeared.
15.
Martin and Gwen were waiting.
They had realized that something was up. They wanted to tell Phillip and needed to tell Brit. They decided that finding Brit first was their priority, and decided to start with Brit the Younger, since she was the one in direct danger. They went to her home. Nik knew Gwen well and let them in, but was adamant that when Brit went out on her little head-clearing trips, she was not to be disturbed. Martin saw Phillip’s staff lying on the floor next to one of the chairs, and asked Nik if Brit had company.
Nik said, “Yes. A gentleman named Phillip.”
Nik assured Gwen and Martin that Brit would be back soon and told them to have a seat, while he went and got them some refreshments.
Gwen and Martin had just settled into their seats when Brit and Phillip returned.
Brit had her legs pulled in toward her body, one hand pointing into space, the other trapping Phillip’s ankle under her arm. Phillip had one leg (the one Brit was clinging to) stretched out and the other pulled up, with his knee to his chest as if he intended to kick Brit in the face. His back was hunched, his arms were akimbo, and in his right hand, he was holding a metal pointer like he had just been giving a science lecture. They both appeared out of thin air, soaking wet and several feet off the ground.
They fell to the floor with a wet thud, then lay there gasping for air. Gwen rushed to their sides to offer aid. Martin leaned forward in his chair.
Once she had caught her breath, Brit leaned up on one elbow, looked at Phillip, and said, “Were you going to kick me in the head?”
Phillip shrugged and said, “Sorry. I thought you were the squid.”
Martin said, “Well, there’s got to be a story behind that.”
Gwen helped Brit to her feet. Martin watched, smirking as Phillip clambered to a standing position, then wrung some of the brine out of his hat. Brit said, “Thanks, Gwen. By the way, what are you two doing here?”
Gwen put a reassuring hand on Brit’s shoulder and said, “We need to talk. Martin and I think someone may be trying to kill you.”